Holocaust Denial:
Background & Overview

One of the most notable anti-Semitic propaganda movements to develop over the past two decades
has been the organized effort to deny or minimize the established history of Nazi genocide against the Jews.
In the United States, the movement has been known in recent years primarily
through the publication of editorial-style advertisements in college
campus newspapers. The first of these ads claimed to call for "open
debate on the Holocaust"; it purported to question not the fact
of Nazi anti-Semitism, but merely whether this hatred resulted in an
organized killing program. A more recent ad has questioned the authenticity
of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. These ads have
been published in several dozen student newspapers on campuses across
the country.

Similar propaganda has established a beachhead on
the computer Internet. In addition to creating their own home pages,
Holocaust deniers have sometimes "crashed" the sites of legitimate
Holocaust and Jewish discussion groups in a blatant effort at anti,
Jewish provocation and self-promotion. Additionally, Holocaust deniers
have advertised their Web sites by purchasing innocuous-sounding, inconspicuous
classified ads in college and community newspapers.

These paid advertisements and Internet activities
have been a national phenomenon since 1991. Though there is no evidence
that they have persuaded large numbers of students to doubt the settled
record of events which comprise the Holocaust, their appearance has
generated acrimony and has frequently caused friction between Jewish
and non-Jewish students.

This is precisely the intent of the Holocaust deniers:
by attacking the facts of the Holocaust, and by framing this attack
as merely an unorthodox point of view, their propaganda insinuates subtle
but hateful anti-Semitic beliefs of Jews as exploiters of non-Jewish
guilt and Jews as controllers of academia or the media. These beliefs,
in fact, bear comparison to the preachings which brought Hitler to power
in prewar Germany.

This pamphlet has been designed to provide a brief
summary of the propaganda campaign known as Holocaust "revisionism,"
or Holocaust denial. What follows is (1) a "Q&A" description
of the movement, its history, and its leading activists, as well as
a review of legal and scholarly responses to this propaganda; (2) a
summary of the movement's most common allegations, with brief factual
responses, and (3) a selection of quotes by the leading propagandists,
demonstrating their anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi agendas.

It is highly unlikely that this report will dissuade
the Holocaust deniers from their mendacious and hateful campaign. But
this information should provide students and educators with the facts
to make informed decisions and vigorous responses to these bigoted lies.

Holocaust denial is a propaganda movement active in the United States, Canada and Western Europe which seeks to deny the reality of the Nazi regime's systematic mass murder of 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II.

The roots of Holocaust denial can be found in the
bureaucratic language of Nazi policy itself, which sought to camouflage
the genocidal intent of what the Nazis called the "Final Solution
to the Jewish Question," even as these directives were being carried
out. After the war, former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers dismissed the
overwhelming proof of the Holocaust established at the Nuremberg war
crimes trials; similarly, an obscure group of post-War French Trotskyists
and anarchists led by Paul Rassinier (since deceased), seeking to advance
their own political agenda, denounced evidence of the genocide as "Stalinist
atrocity propaganda."

However, as an organized propaganda movement, Holocaust
"revisionism" took root in 1979 when Willis Carto, founder
of Liberty Lobby - the largest anti-Jewish propaganda organization in
the United States - incorporated the Institute for Historical Review
(IHR). The IHR is a pseudo-academic enterprise in which professors with
no credentials in history (for example, the late Revilo P. Oliver was
a retired University of Illinois Classics teacher; Robert Faurisson
earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Lyon; Arthur Butz
is an engineer at Northwestern University), writers without formal academic
certification (such as David Irving, Henri Roques and Bradley Smith),
and career anti-Semites (such as Mark Weber, Ernst Zündel and the
late David McCalden) convene to develop new outlets for their anti-Jewish,
anti-Israel and, for some, pro, Nazi beliefs.

Since 1993, Willis Carto has broken with the IHR in
a very public, litigious feud. He has devoted considerable funds and
rhetorical vehemence to dis. crediting his former employees, and has
also established a rival "revisionist" journal, The Barnes
Review. At issue in the feud, primarily, is not the history of
the Holocaust - which both sides of the dispute argue never really happened
- but rather Carto's reportedly dictatorial management style, and the
control of a multimillion-dollar bequest to the parent corporation of
the IHR. Although the dispute remains in litigation, as of this writing
a Superior Court Judge in California has awarded $6.4 million to the
IHR in their civil suit against Carto. The judge, in his ruling for
the Institute, characterized Carto as "evasive and argumentative"
and added that his testimony in large part "made no sense.... By
the end of the trial, I was of the opinion that Mr. Carto lacked candor,
lacked memory and lacked the ability to be forthright about what he
did honestly remember"; ironically, this description could accurately
characterize the entire propaganda movement which Carto founded.

IHR has tapped into an international network of propagandists
who write for the group's Journal of Historical Review (JHR)
and meet at its more-or-less annual conventions. The leading activists
affiliated with IHR have included Mark Weber, Bradley Smith and Fred
Leuchter (USA); Ernst Zündel (Canada); David Irving (England);
Robert Faurisson (France); Carlo Mattogno (Italy); and Ahmed Rami (Sweden).
Of these activists, Bradley Smith, who served for many years as IHR's
"Media Project Director," has attracted the most notoriety
in the U.S., due to the series of "revisionist" advertisements
which he has placed in college newspapers since 1991 for the Committee
for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).

Nonetheless, IHR has suffered noticeably from its
feud with Carto. Since breaking with its founder in 1993, the professional
staff at the Institute has shrunk from seven to two - Mark Weber, now
serving as director, and Greg Raven, who operates IHR's World Wide Web
site - and its increasingly infrequent publications have consisted mostly
of reprints from previous issues of the Journal of Historical
Review, along with at times desperate appeals for funding. Most recently,
IHR announced that its 1996 conference would be postponed indefinitely.

Though Smith claims the "Committee" is an
independent entity devoted to promoting "open debate," it
has operated essentially as a vehicle for IHR propaganda. CODOH was
first headed by Smith and Mark Weber, then-editor of the JHR; its founder
was the late William Curry, a longtime supporter of the IHR. Every other
associate of the group has also been a public participant in IHR conferences.
CODOH ads and flyers list the IHR address and cite IHR sources almost
exclusively. Additionally, Bradley Smith's Web page on the computer
Internet - which is fairly elaborate and has constituted the bulk of
his activity since 1995 -provides links to the IHR site, as well as
other Holocaust-denial outlets. Smith, moreover, appears to have suffered
from

the same decline in fortune affecting the IHR. He
has not written a new editorial-style advertisement since 1993, and
his pre-existing ads appeared in only seven newspapers in 1995, and
one in 1996, down from 13 in 1993. Instead, Smith's current campus outreach
tends to consist of inconspicuous, anonymous classified ads promoting
his Web site; the only indication of Smith's agenda in these ads is
a reference to "Unanswered Questions About the Nazi Gas Chambers."

In addition to overt neo-Nazi groups, such as the
National Alliance,1 which promote denial of the Holocaust
as part of a comprehensive racist and anti-Semitic agenda, one of the
most active Holocaust deniers on the computer Internet is the German-born
Canadian hatemonger Ernst Zündel Zündel whose anti-Semitic
activities extend back to the mid-70s, and include associations with
the IHR and the neo-Nazi publication, Liberty Bell, as well as the authorship
of books such as The Hitler We Loved and Why, has established perhaps
the most extensive Holocaust-denial Web site on the Internet. Often
updated daily, Zündel's home page, operated by a previously obscure
Southern California writer named Ingrid Rimland, publishes materials
in English, French and German and includes audio recordings of Zündel's
own speeches. In addition to his Internet activities - which he, like
Bradley Smith, promotes by purchasing inconspicuous ads in college and
local newspapers - Zündel also produces a cable-access TV program
as well as German and English-language shortwave radio broadcasts, each
of which is also devoted to Holocaust denial.

In Canada and Western Europe, Holocaust deniers have
been successfully prosecuted under racial defamation or hate crimes
laws. In the United States, however, the First Amendment guarantees
the right of free speech, regardless of political content. Nonetheless,
though the First Amendment guarantees Holocaust deniers the right to
produce and distribute their propaganda, it in no way obligates newspapers
or other media outlets to provide them with a forum for their views.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 1974 decision, Miami
Herald Publishing Company v. Tornillo , that "A newspaper
is more than a passive receptacle or conduit for news, comment and advertising.
The choice of material to go into a newspaper... [constitutes] the exercise
of editorial control and judgment." Simply stated, to require newspaper
editors or broadcasters to provide Smith, or any other individual, with
a forum would deny the newspaper or other media their own First Amendment
rights to operate a free press, without government coercion; such requirements
would also diminish the public's ability to distinguish historical truth
from propaganda.

Like the editor of a private newspaper, the editors
of all private and most public college newspapers have a First Amendment
right to exercise editorial control over which advertisements appear
in their newspaper. The only situation in which an editor of a state
university newspaper would not have this right would be if the university
administration controlled the content of the campus newspaper and set
editorial policy. In such a case, the university would essentially function
as an arm of the government, and prohibition of newspaper advertisements
based on content would violate the First Amendment. There are few universities,
however, where the administration exercises this type of control over
the student paper.

At public elementary and secondary schools, the administration
has the right to refuse to print Holocaust-denial advertisements in
a student newspaper; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 1988 decision, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, that "educators
do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over.
. . the content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities
so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical
concern." Based on that decision, it is clear that public school
officials have the same right as student editors to reject Holocaust-denial
advertisements, since this propaganda encourages bias and prejudice,
offends many individuals and has a negative educational value.

The one case directly involving the substance of Holocaust-denial
propaganda in an American court was a 1985 lawsuit brought against the
IHR by Mel Mermelstein, a Holocaust survivor living in Long Beach, California.
In the early '80s, Mermelstein had responded to a cynical IHR publicity
campaign which offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove that Jews had
been gassed at Auschwitz by submitting evidence that members of his
own family had been murdered at that concentration camp. When the IHR
failed to comply with its promised terms, Mermelstein filed his suit.
In July 1985, the lawsuit was settled in Mermelstein's favor. The settlement,
approved by judge Robert Wenke of the Los Angeles Superior Court, called
for the IHR to pay Mermelstein the $50,000 "reward," as well
as an additional $40,000 for pain and suffering. Moreover, at a pre-trial
hearing, the Court took judicial notice of the fact that gas chambers
had been used to murder Jews at Auschwitz.

Several months later, Mermelstein won another victory
against the Holocaust-denial movement. In January 1986, a Los Angeles
Superior Court jury awarded Mermelstein $4.75 million in punitive damages
and $500,000 in compensatory damages in a suit he had filed in 1981
against Ditlieb Felderer, a Swedish Holocaust denier whose publication, Jewish Information Bulletin (it is in fact none of these),
had mocked the killing of Jews at Auschwitz and had attacked Mermelstein
personally. Later that year, the IHR and Willis Carto sued Mermelstein,
claiming he libeled them during a radio interview given in New York.
In 1988, they voluntarily dropped the charges.

The History Department at Duke University, responding
to a CODOH ad, unanimously adopted and published a statement noting:
"That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision
is certainly correct; however, what historians do is very different
from this advertisement. Historical revision of major events. . . is
not concerned with the actuality of these events; rather, it concerns
their historical interpretation - their causes and consequences generally.
There is no debate among historians about the actuality of the Holocaust...
there can be no doubt that the Nazi state systematically put to death
millions of Jews, Gypsies, political radicals and other people."

David Oshinsky and Michael Curtis of Rutgers University
have written, "If one group advertises that the Holocaust never
happened, another can buy space to insist that American Blacks were
never enslaved. The stakes are high because college newspapers may soon
be flooded with ads that present discredited assertions as if they were
part of normal historical debate. If the Holocaust is not a fact, then
nothing is a fact...."

Peter Hayes, Associate Professor of History and German
at Northwestern University, responded to a Smith ad by stating, "[B]ear
in mind that not a single one of the advances in our knowledge since
1945 has been contributed by the self-styled 'Revisionists' whom Smith
represents. That is so because contributing to knowledge is decidedly
not their purpose . . . . This ad is an assault on the intellectual
integrity ... of academicians, whom Smith and his ilk wish to browbeat.
It is also a throwback to the worst sorts of conspiracy-mongering of
anti-Semitic broadside.... Is it plausible that so great and longstanding
a conspiracy of repression could really have functioned? ... That everybody
with a Ph.D. active in the field - German, American, Canadian, British,
Israeli, etc. - is in on it together?... If one suspects it is, might
it not be wise to do a bit of checking about Smith, his organization
and his charges before running so implausible an ad?"

Perhaps most significantly, in December 1991, the
governing council of the American Historical Association (AHA), the
nation's largest and oldest professional organization for historians,
unanimously approved a statement condemning the Holocaust-denial movement,
stating, "No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took
place." The council's action came in response to a petition circulated
among members calling for an official statement against Holocaust-denial
propaganda; the petition had been signed by more than 300 members attending
the organization's annual conference. Moreover, in 1994, the AHA reaffirmed
its position in a press release which stated that "the Association
will not provide a forum for views that are, at best, a form of academic
fraud."

There is no single Nazi document that expressly enumerates
a "master plan" for the annihilation of European Jewry. Holocaust-denial
propagandists misrepresent this fact as an exposure of the Holocaust
"hoax"; in doing so, they reveal a fundamentally misleading
approach to the history of the era. That there was no single document
does not mean there was no plan. The "Final Solution" the
Nazis' comprehensive plan to murder all European Jews - was, as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust observes, "the culmination
of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy."2 The destruction
process was shaped gradually: it was borne of many thousands of directives.3

The development and implementation of this process
was overseen and directed by the highest tier of Nazi leadership, including
Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Goering
and Adolf Hitler himself. For the previous two decades, Hitler had relentlessly
pondered Jewish annihilation.4 In a September 16, 1919, letter
he wrote that while "the Jewish problem" demanded an "anti-Semitism
of reason" - comprising systematic legal and political sanctions
- "the final goal, however, must steadfastly remain the removal
of the Jews altogether."5

Throughout the 1920s, Hitler maintained that "the
Jewish question" was the "pivotal question" for his Party
and would be solved "with well-known German thoroughness to the
final consequence."6 With his assumption to power in
1933, Hitler's racial notions were implemented by measures that increasingly
excluded Jews from German society.

On January 30, 1939, Hitler warned that if Jewish
financiers and Bolsheviks initiated war, "The result will not be
the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but
the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."7 On
September 21, 1939, after the Germans invaded Poland, SD chief Heydrich
ordered the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units operating
in German-occupied territory) to forcibly concentrate Polish Jews into
ghettos, alluding to an unspecified "final aim."8

In the summer of 1941, with preparations underway
for invading Russia, large-scale mass murder initiatives - already practiced
domestically upon the mentally ill and deformed - were broadly enacted
against Jews. Heydrich, acting on Hitler's orders, directed the Einsatzgruppen
to implement the "special tasks" of annihilation in the Soviet
Union of Jews and Soviet commissars.9 On July 31, Heydrich
received orders from Goering to prepare plans "for the implementation
of the aspired final solution of the Jewish question" in all German-occupied
areas.10 Eichmann, while awaiting trial in Israel in 1960,
related that Heydrich had told him in August 1941 that "the Führer
has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews."11 Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in 1946 that "In
the summer of 1941... Himmler said to me, 'The Führer has ordered
the Final Solution to the Jewish Question... I have chosen the Auschwitz
camp for this purpose.'"12

On January 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee
Conference to discuss and coordinate implementation of the Final Solution.
Eichmann later testified at his trial:

These gentlemen... were discussing
the subject quite bluntly, quite differently from the language that
I had to use later in the record. During the conversation they minced
no words about it at all... they spoke about methods of killing, about
liquidation, about extermination.13

Ten days after the conference, while delivering a
speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin that was recorded by the Allied
monitoring service, Hitler declared: "The result of this war will
be the complete annihilation of the Jews... the hour will come when
the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least
for a thousand years."14 On February 24, 1943, he stated:
"This struggle will not end with the annihilation of Aryan mankind,
but with the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe.15

Approximately 6
million Jews were killed in the course of Hitler's Final Solution.

Death camp gas chambers were the primary means of
execution used against the Jews during the Holocaust. The Nazis issued
a directive implementing large-scale gas chambers in the fall of 1941
but, by then, procedures facilitating mass murder, including the utilization
of smaller gas chambers, were already in practice. Before their use
in death camps, gas chambers were central to Hitler's "eugenics"
pro, gram. Between January 1940 and August 1941, 70,273 Germans - most
of them physically handicapped or mentally ill - were gassed, 20-30
at a time, in hermetically shut chambers disguised as shower rooms.16

Meanwhile, mass shooting of Jews had been extensively
practiced on the heels of Germany's Eastern campaign. But these actions
by murder squads had become an increasingly unwieldy process by October
1941. Three directors of the genocide Erhard Wetzel, head of the Racial-Policy
Office: Alfred Rosenberg, consultant on Jewish affairs for the Occupied
Eastern Territories, and Victor Brack, deputy director of the Chancellory,
met at the time with Adolf Eichmann to discuss the use of gas chambers
in the genocide program.17 Thereafter, two technical advisors
for the euthanasia gas chambers, Kriminalkommissar Christian
Wirth and a Dr. Kallmeyer, were sent to the East to begin construction
of mass gas chambers.18 Physicians who had implemented the
euthanasia program were also transferred.

Mobile gassing vans, using the exhaust fumes of diesel
engines to kill passengers, were used to kill Jews at Chelmno and Treblinka
- as well as other sites, not all of them concentration camps - starting
in November 1941.19 At least 320,000 Chelmno prisoners, most
of them Jews, were killed by this method; a total of 870,000 Jews were
murdered at Treblinka using gas vans and diesel-powered gas chambers.20

Gas chambers were installed and operated at Belzec,
Lublin, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau from September 3, 1941,
when the first experimental gassing took place at Auschwitz, until November
1944.22 Working with chambers measuring an average 225 square
feet, the Nazis forced to their deaths 700 to 800 men, women and children
at a time.22 Two-thirds of this program was completed in
1943-44, and at its height it accounted for as many as 20,000 victims
per day.23 Authorities have estimated that these gas chambers
accounted for the deaths of approximately 2E to 3 million Jews.

Holocaust-denial attacks on this record of mass murder
intensified following the end of the Cold War when it was reported that
the memorial at Auschwitz was changed in 1991 to read that 1 million
had died there, instead of 4 million as previously recorded. For Holocaust
deniers, this change appeared to confirm arguments that historical estimates
of Holocaust deaths had been deliberately exaggerated, and that scholars
were beginning to "retreat" in the face of "revisionist"
assertions. Thus, for example, Willis Carto wrote in the February 6,
1995, issue of The Spotlight, the weekly tabloid of his organization,
Liberty Lobby, that "All 'experts' until 1991 claimed that 4 million
Jews were killed at Auschwitz. This impossible figure was reduced in
1991... to 1.1 million.... The facts about deaths at Auschwitz, however...
are still wrong. The Germans kept detailed records of Auschwitz deaths....
These show that no more than 120,000 persons of all religions and ethnicity
died at Auschwitz during the war...."

In fact, Western scholars have never supported the
figure of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz; the basis of this Soviet estimate
- an analysis of the capacity of crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau
- has long been discredited. As early as 1952, Gerald Reitlinger, a
British historian, had convincingly challenged this method of calculation.
Using statistics compiled in registers for Himmler, he asserted that
approximately 1 million people had died at Auschwitz; Raul Hilberg in
1961, and Yehuda Bauer in 1989, confirmed Reitlinger's estimate of Auschwitz
victims. Each of these scholars, nonetheless, has recognized that nearly 6 million Jews were
killed overall during the Holocaust.24 Polish authorities
were therefore responding to long-accepted Western scholarship, further
confirmed subsequently by documents released in post-Soviet Russia;
the cynical allegations of "Holocaust revisionism" played
no part in their decision.

Another frequent claim of Holocaust "revisionists"
concerns what they describe as the lack of objective documentation proving
the facts of the Holocaust, and the reliance by scholars on biased and
poorly collected testimonies of survivors. However, the Germans themselves
left no shortage of documentation and testimony to these events, and
no serious scholar has relied solely on survivor testimony as the conclusive
word on Holocaust history. Lucy Dawidowicz, in the preface to her authoritative
work, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, wrote, "The
German documents captured by the Allied armies at the war's end have
provided an incomparable historical record, which, with regard to volume
and accessibility, has been unique in the annals of scholarship....
The National Archives and the American Historical Association jointly
have published 67 volumes of Guides to German Records Microfilmed
at Alexandria, VA. For my work I have limited myself mainly to
published German documents."26 The author then proceeds
to list 303 published sources - excluding periodicals -documenting the
conclusions of her research. Among these sources are the writings of
recognizable Nazi policy makers such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler,
Rudolf Hoess and Alfred Rosenberg.

Similarly, Raul Hilberg in his three-volume edition
of The Destruction of the European Jews, wrote, "Between
1933 and 1945 the public offices and corporate entities of Nazi Germany
generated a large volume of correspondence. Some of these documents
were destroyed in Allied bombings, and many more were systematically
burned in the course of retreats or in anticipation of surrender. Nevertheless,
the accumulated paper work of the German bureaucracy was vast enough
to survive in significant quantities, and even sensitive folders remained."26

It is thus largely from these primary sources that
the history of the Holocaust has been compiled. A new factor in this
process is the sudden availability of countless records from the former
Soviet Union, many of which had been overlooked or suppressed since
their capture at war's end by the Red Army. Needless to say, the modification
of specific details in this history is certain to continue for a number
of years to come, considering the vastness and complexity of the events
which comprise the Holocaust. However, it is equally certain that these
modifications will only confirm the Holocaust's enormity, rather than
- as the "revisionists" would -call it into question.

Another frequent "revisionist" assertion
calls into question the generally accepted estimates of Jewish victims
of the Holocaust. In attempting to portray the deaths of millions of
Jews as an exaggeration or a fabrication, Holocaust deniers wildly manipulate
reference works, almanac statistics, geopolitical data, bedrock historical
facts and other sources of information and reportage.

For example, "revisionists" commonly cite
various almanac or atlas figures - typically compiled before comprehensive
accounts on the Holocaust were available - that appear to indicate that
the worldwide Jewish population before and after World War II remained
essentially stable, thereby "proving" that 6 million Jews
could not have died during this period.

The widely cited "6 million" figure is derived
from the initial 1945 Nuremberg trial estimate of 5.7 million deaths;
subsequent censuses, statistical analyses, and other demographic studies
of European Jewry have consistently demonstrated the essential accuracy
of this first tally.27 After nearly 50 years of study, historians
agree that approximately 6
million Jews perished during the course of the Nazi genocide.28

In The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz
offers a country-by-country accounting of Jewish deaths.29

Yet another centerpiece of "revisionist"
propaganda attacks the objectivity and legal validity of the postwar
Nuremberg Trials, where much information about the Holocaust first became
public, and where the general history of the genocide was first established.

The actual process of bringing Nazi war criminals
to justice was a lengthy and complicated effort involving the differing
legal traditions and political agendas of the United States, England,
France and the Soviet Union. As the historical record shows, the allied
victors, if anything, erred on the side of leniency toward the accused
Nazis.

Discussions concerning allied treatment of war criminals
had begun as early as October 1943.30 In the summer months
following Germany's surrender in 1945, British, American and Soviet
representatives met in London to create the charter for an international
military tribunal to prosecute "major criminals" whose offenses
extended over the entire Reich, and who therefore could be punished
by joint decision of the Governments of the Allies.31

By early autumn, the Allies had resolved their debates
over whom to prosecute and how to define the crimes committed during
the Holocaust; the first trials began thereafter in Nuremberg, before
an international military tribunal. The chief defendant was Hermann
Goering, but the prosecution also selected 20 other leading officials
from the Nazi party, German government ministries, central bureaucracy,
armament and labor specialists, the military and territorial chiefs.32

These trials did not result in either "rubber
stamp" guilty verdicts or identical sentences. In fact, of the
21 defendants, three were set free; one received a 10-year sentence;
one a 15-year sentence; two, 20-year sentences; three, life sentences,
and 11 received the death penalty.33

The defendants, moreover, had access to 206 attorneys,
136 of whom had been Nazi party members.34 Furthermore, as
Raul Hilberg stated, "The judges in Nuremberg were established
American lawyers. They had not come to exonerate or convict. They were
impressed with their task, and they approached it with much experience
in the law and little anticipation of the facts.35

A second round of trials resulted in 25 death sentences,
20 life sentences, 97 sentences of 25 years or less, and 3 5 not-guilty
verdicts.36 By 1951, following the recommendations of an
American-run clemency board, 77 of the 142 convicted criminals had been
released from prison.37